CONJOINED, a marriage poem
The onion in my cupboard, a monster, actually
two joined under one transparent skin:
each half-round, then flat and deformed
where it pressed and grew against the other.
An accident, like the two-headed calf rooted
in one body, fighting to suck at its mother’s teats;
or like those other freaks, Chang and Eng[1], twins
joined at the chest by skin and muscle, doomed
to live, even make love, together for sixty years.
Do you feel the skin that binds us
together as we move, heavy in this house?
To sever the muscle could free one,
but might kill the other. Ah, but men
don’t slice onions in the kitchen, seldom see
what is invisible. We cannot escape each other.
--Judith Minty
[1] Chang and Eng: The original and most famous Siamese twins, born in 1811. They were never separated but nevertheless fathered twenty-two children. They died in 1874